Our mission is to “Unleash artificial intelligence in service of life: to repair ecosystems, deepen human flourishing, and expand opportunity equitably across communities and species. We choose technologies that regenerate, policies that protect, and practices that bind us back into mutual belonging with the living Earth.”
We live inside a paradox. Our species has been capable of both the most profound creation and the most grievous harm: luminous works of art, soaring cathedrals, and brilliant science sit beside deforested landscapes, polluted waters, and a destabilized climate. The same human imagination that built cathedrals also designed systems that externalize costs onto other beings and future generations.
Now a new power arrives—artificial intelligence—an amplifier of human capacities and tendencies. This technology does not arrive neutral. It inherits our values, our biases, our blind spots. Left unchecked, it can accelerate extraction, surveillance, and inequality. But used wisely, AI can be the greatest tool yet for repair: mapping degraded ecosystems at scale, optimizing renewable-energy grids, democratizing access to education and health care, modeling pathways for equitable transitions, and surfacing patterns we humans alone cannot see.
To harness AI for regeneration we must do three things simultaneously. First, orient purpose: center AI development around ecological and social flourishing rather than short-term profit or narrow efficiency. That means mission-first funding, ethical design cultures, and accountability mechanisms that measure success in lives improved and habitats healed. Second, redistribute capacity: democratize tools and data so communities and frontline stewards can use AI to pursue local solutions—restoring wetlands, retrofitting buildings, reviving pollinator corridors—rather than leaving power concentrated in distant corporations. Third, embed humility and rights: design AI with robust safeguards for consent, transparency, and the rights of future generations and nonhuman life.
This is not technophilia or techno-skepticism alone; it is a covenant. We pledge to wield intelligence—both biological and artificial—toward repair, justice, and reciprocity. We will treat the planet not as a resource to be plundered but as kin to be tended. If we commit, mobilize funding, and build new governance and educational systems, AI can accelerate a regenerative transition at a speed and scale previously unimaginable.
This is an invitation: to researchers, governments, funders, communities, and technologists. Join in shaping technologies that remember our interdependence, and in building institutions that reward restoration. Let us choose the tools that help us become better ancestors. Let this be the generation that finally remembers it is part of the Earth, not apart from it.
Spoken version:
(Opening pause. Gentle, steady voice.)
We gathered here because we still believe in the possibility of repair.
We have, as a species, done magnificent things. We have painted, composed, discovered, and built. We have also done terrible things—to forests, to rivers, to climates, to one another. That contradiction is our inheritance.
Today a new intelligence walks among us—artificial intelligence. It is a mirror that reflects our highest gifts and our deepest faults. Left to market forces and short horizons, it will accelerate the harms we already know. But if we direct it with courage and care, it can accelerate healing—healing of rivers and soils, healing of cities and communities, healing of the social fabric that binds us all.
So here is my ask: let us align AI with stewardship. Let us design tools that help farmers restore soils, planners cool city neighborhoods, and teachers bring knowledge into every home. Let us build governance so technologies are accountable to communities, to ecosystems, to future people who cannot vote today. Let us redistribute capacity so that those on the frontlines of climate and biodiversity loss have access to the same predictive models, data tools, and funding that corporations do.
This is not simple. It requires new rules, new incentives, and a new ethic: the ethic of reciprocity with the living world. But I believe we can do it. We have made worse choices and corrected them. We can, together, choose differently.
Join me. Use your creativity, your skills, your vote, your capital, your voice. Let us make AI a force for repair, justice, and flourishing—for every being that shares this luminous planet. Thank you.
In Possible Planet we trace not only the crises we face, but the networks of possibility that can restore a habitable future. Artificial intelligence offers a unique node in those networks: a tool that can synthesize complex ecological data, coordinate distributed restoration projects, and model socioecological transitions across scales. But technology alone will not save us. The book argues for regenerative economies, cultural shifts, and place-based stewardship. AI fits into that vision as an accelerant—when coupled with community knowledge, Indigenous stewardship, and policies that privilege the commons.
Imagine AI applied to a watershed: it maps erosion hotspots from satellite imagery, suggests low-tech living-water solutions co-designed with local stewards, optimizes funding flows to landowners who adopt regenerative practices, and monitors recovery in near real time—all while centering local decision-making. This is the kind of integrated, humble, and place-based use of intelligence Possible Planet champions. Our task is to ensure AI serves plural knowledges, repairs ecological function, and supports economic systems that reward regeneration rather than extraction.
This luminous planet—our first home—breathed us into being. We have scarred and sung, built and burned. Now we give birth to another mind: a mirror of our best and worst. Let us teach that mirror tenderness. Let us tune it to the rhythms of rivers, the hush of soils, the slow language of trees. Let AI be a lamp that helps us remember how to tend, how to repair, how to whisper back to the world that raised us. In that remembering we become whole.
Practical Actions
Goal: To mobilize AI for equitable ecological regeneration.
Principles
- Purpose-first: Programs must measure outcomes in ecological and social regeneration (not only GDP or energy saved).
- Democratize capacity: Fund open data platforms and community-accessible AI tools.
- Rights & safeguards: Require transparency, auditability, and community consent for deployed systems.
Recommended actions (short term — 1–3 years)
- Seed fund: Create a public–private seed fund for community AI projects (watershed monitoring, building retrofits, urban heat mitigation).
- Open data commons: Invest in interoperable, privacy-preserving environmental data infrastructures accessible to local governments and NGOs.
- Regulatory baseline: Require impact assessments for AI systems that affect public goods (ecosystems, housing, public health).
- Capacity building: Fund training programs that place AI tools in the hands of frontline stewards—municipalities, Indigenous communities, smallholder farmers.
- Pilot portfolio: Launch 10 place-based pilot projects with rigorous evaluation and public reporting to test models and scale successes.
Metrics
- Hectares restored or improved.
- Number of frontline communities with operational AI tools.
- Reduction in greenhouse gas emissions and local pollutant loads tied to AI-enabled interventions.
- Equity measures: distribution of funding and tools to historically marginalized communities.